Official method for determining modular X module path?

[Thomas Winischhofer]

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Mike A. Harris wrote:
> Andy Ritger wrote:
> 
>>>> I think the moduledir variable was discussed on IRC, and a recent
>>>> Gentoo install defines moduledir, but a user reported that it is
>>>> not defined on Fedora Core 5 RC1.  Does the moduledir definition
>>>> in the pkgconfig *.pc files come from the Xorg modular build, or is
>>>> that something distribution maintainers will need to handle manually?
>>>>
>>>> I'm nervous that this could be the kind of thing that would be easy
>>>> for a distro to overlook, and would only be exposed when someone
>>>> tried to install a 3rd party driver.
>>>
>>>
>>> It depends from distribution to distribution.  For Ubuntu and Debian,
>>> this will only be installed if you install xserver-xorg-dev, which also
>>> installs all the development headers.
>>
>>
>> That may be problematic for users -- I expect many people won't
>> install the xserver-xorg-dev package, and it doesn't seem like that
>> should be necessary inorder for 3rd party installation tools to
>> know the module path.
> 
> 
> The distribution packaging of the particular driver should query
> the value of 'moduledir' from pkgconfig at package build time, and
> use that.  Alternatively, if one set of binaries is to be used,
> which are built outside of any package management system, but which
> will be packaged in a variety of package management systems such
> as rpm, dpkg, emerge, etc. then these packages "source" will actually
> be binary driver tarballs or similar, and the packaging can still
> query moduledir at package creation time to know where that distro
> keeps the module directory.
> 
> That way, even one set of binaries can end up being installed to
> different locations on different distributions.  There should never
> be a need to have a development package installed at runtime to
> query though, that should always be done at build time, either
> software build time, or software 'packaging' time  (which for OSS
> drivers is simultaneous of course, but which might be different
> times and people for non-OSS).
> 
> The only possible problem I can think of, is for generic tarballs
> or other generic installation mechanisms that do not use any
> package management system at all.  Those should only be used
> by the IHVs, distribution packagers, or community packagers
> themselves however for the creation of working packages for the
> given distro using the accepted package management system for
> that distro. ;o)
> 
> Direct use of generic tarballs or custom distribution neutral
> installation scripts should be discouraged.  ;o)
> 
> If there was a demand for this however, perhaps the X server could
> have some options added to it to permit querying of the location of
> the moduledir and other paths.  Perhaps "X -query(moduledir)" or
> something.  Any thoughts?

Why not add this to "-version" (easily "grepable")?

Thomas

- --
Thomas Winischhofer
Vienna/Austria
thomas AT winischhofer DOT net          http://www.winischhofer.net/

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